We have come to the end of the journeys planned for the first half of the year. We have visited the Art Nouveau Subotica and the Hasidic cemeteries of Tokaj, defeated the Ukrainian potholes from Subcarpathia through Czernowitz and Kamenets-Podolsk to Odessa and back, participated at the Easter of three denominations in Lemberg, and on the way of the wooden churches and painted Renaissance monasteries we reunited Maramureș and Bukovina, cut in two by a country border. And in the meantime we compiled, visited and discussed, and now publish the journeys proposed for the second half of the year, to the program of whose we also welcome the recommendations of our readers. The planned costs include in each case the trip (by bus), accommodation (in double room), and the guided tour. The language of the guide – optionally, English, Italian, German or Spanish – will depend on the composition of the group.

As usual, I ask anyone interested in one or another trip to write, without an obligation (but with a serious intention) until Saturday, 3 August at wang@studiolum.com. Then, when we already know the number of participants, we will publish the dailed program of the trip, the exact costs (including the eventual single room complement), and the application and payment deadline on our page “Come with us”, which, linked to the right margin, serves as a constantly updated travel schedule.

• The lost world of the Eastern Galician shtetl, 25–29 August (Sunday–Thursday). The fellow passengers of río Wang may have already accustomed to the fact that in our trips we visit a lot of things that no longer exist, but this is the first time that all our journey is dedicated to a completely vanished world, the network of former Jewish towns from Stryj through Sambór and Żółkiew to Brod and Tarnopol, and from there, through Czortków and Buczacz to the Bukovinian border, thus moving around in the Eastern, now Ukrainian half of Galicia. We visit the beautiful, decaying cemeteries and synagogues, we reconstruct the life and relationships of this network of settlements, we recall the memory of the illustrious personalities and movements. The summary of our posts on the Jewish heritage of the region can be found here. Planned costs: approx. 300 euro.

• Lemberg Klezmer Festival, 30 August – 2 September (Friday – Monday). This is the fifth year that the Jewish Cultural Association of the city organizes a summer klezmer festival with the participation of a number of authentic Eastern European – Ukrainian, Moldovan, Russian – bands as well as invited international celebrities. During the weekend festival we also visit the hidden corners of the city with those who are for the first time in Lemberg, and make an excursion to the Polish Renaissance royal palace of Olesko. An interactive map of the monuments of Lemberg and our posts on the city are collected here. Planned costs: approx. 220-280 euros.

• Western Galicia: shtetls and castles, 2–6 October (Wednesday – Sunday). Continuing our journey of August, now we visit the Western, Polish half of Galicia, where the greater proximity to the cultural and economic centers make it more visible that the Jewish shtetls were born in under the protection and for the service of the landlords’ fortresses, as the 17th-century proverb says: “there is no proper Polish nobleman without his own Jew”. We visit the network of the former shtetls in parallel with the magnificent Renaissance palaces and royal castles, from Kraków’s Kazimierz through the Renaissance towns of Opatów, Sandomierz and Tarnów to Lublin and Zamość, now on the World Heritage list. We will also visit the important Galician sites of the First World War, such as the fortress of Przemyśl. Planned costs: approx. 300 euros.

• The Crimea, 23-29 October (Wednesday – Tuesday). We gradually expand to the East, after Odessa now we have reached the Crimean peninsula (and the Caucasus follows in the next year). We arrive by plane to Simferopol (the tickets should be individually purchased: now, three months in advance you can buy it for about 300 euros from all over Europe), and from there we go around by bus in the ethnically diverse peninsula, rich in stunning natural beauties and historical monuments. We will see medieval Karaite cemetery and a Jewish mountain town, Genovese and Gothic citadel, impressive palaces of the Russian aristocracy along the southern coast between Sevastopol and Yalta, Orthodox places of pilgrimages and Tatar mosques. Planned costs (in addition to the plane ticket): approx. 450 euros

• “Lightning” in Maramureș, 31 October – 3 November (Thursday – Saturday). One of the greatest celebration of the Romanian region is the “lightning” in the cemeteries around All Saints’ Day, when the cemetery hills are full of life, those living far away come home, and the families commemorate together their deads, often hosting the strangers, too. This is why we repeat at this time the Romanian half of our spring tour, by visiting the traditional wooden churches of Maramureș, the “merry cemetery” of Sapănța, the market of Sighetu Marmației, the open air museum of wooden folk architecture in Baia Mare. Planned costs: approx. 220-250 euros.

• The unknown Mallorca, 17–22 January (Friday – Wednesday). The true face of this beautiful and archaic island – of which our old readers know that it is our second home – can be got to know in January, when the flood of the tourists stops for a month, and the island for a short while lives only its own traditional life. The weather is mild, almond trees are blossoming, and orange is ripen, and the settlements celebrate two greatest events, the feasts of Saint Anthony, protector of the farmers, and Saint Sebastian, patron of Palma, in a veritable Mediterranean joie de vivre, with fireworks, the parade of the masked devils who tempted St. Anthony, fires and grilling on the streets and squares. In addition, we walk through the old town of Palma, the ancient Jewish quarter, the Medieval and Renaissance inner courtyards, the Arabic towns along the coasts and the manor houses in the mountains, we taste wine in Binissalem and sail over to the little island of the blue lizards. Our posts on Mallorca can be read here. Planned costs (in addition to the plane tickets, which is usually 200-250 euros from the continent): approx. 450-480 euros.

Our readers have suggested the possibility of a weekend in the former Hasidic villages of the wine region of Tokaj, to follow the centuries old “route of the Jewish wine” from Tokaj through Košice, Prešov and Bardejov to Poland, or to repeat in October the one-week long Czernowitz–Kamenets-Podolsk–Odessa tour. These are also available if enough people apply for them, especially if any of the above tours will have not enough applicants, so we will have to organize something else instead of it. Please feel free to write, to ask, to suggest.

This afternoon, everything was dark and humid all along this Armenian valley, and in the monastery of Haghpat, paved with tombstones, everything was even darker and more humid.
The taxi parked below in a small square. Nobody came to see us. True, there was a woman sitting in a folding chair at the entrance of the main church, but she also fled when she saw me.
Somewhat later, in Sanahin, in the dusk of the other side of the valley, another woman, coming from I don’t know where, stopped me: “Девушка!” She stopped to offer me a pansy, a bunch of small purple flowers, with all their roots. She remembere two words of her French learned decades earlier, when Armenia still belonged to a different world. “Bonjour camarade!”
Who has ever called me “comrade” where I come from?

As elsewhere in the Caucasus, these ancient villages were built on the hills overlooking the valleys, which remained desert until the late 18th century.
Odzun, Haghpat and Sanahin thus extended for at least a millennium on the jagged plateaus above the town of Alaverdi, both close to one another in a straight line and separated by hours of walking through a series of valleys cut deep by the rivers running in them.
Alaverdi, down there, was like a foreign land.

All the towns in these valleys belong to another world than the villages of the heights: they were industrial towns born in the late 18th century, or in the 19th, or even later, during the USSR; rich, active and populous towns – today all ruined cities.
The marshrutka of Yerevan, a filthy wreck, abandoned us in the morning in Vanadzor, the former Kirovakan, somewhere between the huge chemical complexes surrounding the city. The taxi, with which we went further, was driven by an Armenian from Rostov-on-Don, a school bus driver in retirement, living by traveling back and forth between Russia and Armenia. He drove us from Vanadzor through the valley to Alaverdi, another devastated industrial city, whose abandonment left behind a valley covered with the dust of copper.
A valley like an oppressive corridor: the valley follows the river, the road follows the valley, the railway follows the road, and nothing can come out of the valley without climbing the rocks.

In Alaverdi we had lunch near a petrol station just before the bridge, a simple wooden shack with one single table, a large painting representing Mount Ararat, and a somewhat withdrawn young mistress with bleached hair, who, thrilled by our arrival, brought us to taste everything she had.

At one point, she called me to the back of her booth, inviting me to step out on the balcony overlooking the river. With a broad movement of the arm, she offered me the scenery: what she loved above all in this place, she said, was the beauty of the landscape – everything is so beautiful here, the mountain, the river down there, the trees…

And I wanted so much that this beauty be accessible to me, too. That I could also see the beauty of this place, of this canyon, which at that time was the scariest place I had ever met: the jagged rocks here and there covered with reddened snow, the water below us, made brown by the mud of the copper as an unhealthy paste, the trees, still leafless, but loaded with hundreds of multicolored plastic bags, and the cavernous walls of the factories and buildings – all enveloped in one question: is this the way people live?

I told her: yes, spring is coming, and I went back.

The railway in the valley goes from Yerevan to Moscow. In the train Moscow-Yerevan, which in 1991 is crossing a disintegrating country, Artavazd Pelechian is filming the faces with a handheld camera. Faces of men and women, children’s faces, faces that are vivid, faces falling asleep, each taken in the scroll of a trip, where the horizon appears but in fragments. Pelechian, born in 1938 in Leninakan, in Soviet Armenia, is a director of film essays, a documentary filmmaker, and a film theorist. His films are mostly short or medium-length, almost silent, even if sound has a central place in them.

The railway is not abandoned, still there pass some trains on it every day – but now it lives another life. The valley is not yet abandoned either, but it is sleeping, it is being extinguished. Many have left it for far away places.

Then leaving the valley, heading up, leaving everything behind. Leaving the railway, the road, the towns, the factories, the rust, the crumbling cement, the debris, the dirty snow.
Up into the wood.

Mounting.Toward the villages.Toward all that opens its doors to the passer-by, the traveler, the wanderer.Toward the memory.Upwards.

Among the many ethnic groups of historical Hungary perhaps the Armenians are the least known. True, many of us have an acquaintance with Transylvanian Armenian origins, and in the early 1990s, after the introduction of the new law on ethnic minorities we saw with surprise the multitude of the newly formed Armenian local governments, but the exact origins and time of arrival of the Armenians to Hungary and the considerable role played by them in 18th to 20th-century Hungarian history was only recently presented in detail by such volumes as Miklós Gazdovits’ Az erdélyi örmények története (History of the Transylvanian Armenians, 2006), Gazda Dezső’s Gyergyói örmények könyve (Book of the Gyergyó Armenians, 2007), or the Örmény diaszpóra a Kárpát-medencében (Armenian diaspora in the Carpathian Basin, 2006-2007), edited by Sándor Őze and Bálint Kovács. This makes so important the exhibition Far away from Mount Ararat – Armenian culture in the Carpathian Basin of the Budapest History Museum, which for the first time gives an overview on the history and culture of the Armenians in Hungary.

The exhibition does not attempt to be comprehensive. It only groups around some core themes a large number of Hungarian Armenian objects of art, most of which are now presented for the first time at a public exhibition. The themes are introduced by short descriptions, and the juxtaposition of the objects in itself suggests a historical and thematic thread, but – and this is our only, but serious criticism – precisely the obscurity of this history and the ground-breaking character of the exhibition would have required a catalog to present in detail the historical and social context of these objects, persons and places.

The road leading through the over four hundred years of history of the Armenians in Hungary starts at Mount Ararat, as the basic reference point of post-flood humanity and especially of the Armenians, from which the Armenians immigrating into Transylvania in the 17th century were indeed far away. But the proof that they have preserved the memory of the origins is the 19th-century silver belt, inlaid with gems, conserved at the Armenian Catholic Parish of Budapest, whose pieces represent the vedutas of ancient Armenian cities, Varaghavank, Van, Echmiadzin, Aghtamar (each image is enlarged by moving the mouse above them).

In the middle of the room of the beginnings we are greeted by the icon of St.Gregory the Illuminator, Apostle of the Armenians, due to whose efforts Armenia became the first Christian country in 301. It is a nice transition from the Ararat to the other, Transylvanian half of the room that the icon of the 3rd-century bishop, preserved in the Armenian church of Szamosújvár/Gherla was painted in a popular Transylvanian Baroque style, just as his statue standing in the main square of the Armenian quarter of Isfahan bears the traits of the figures of the Persian heroic epic.

The next room illustrates the history of Armenian book printing with a large number of never exhibited books from Armenian collections in the Carpathian Basin, including the world’s first printed Armenian bible and Armenian textbook. This topic is also the apropos of the exhibition, organized for the five hundredth anniversary of the publication of the first Armenian printed book, the prayer book called Urbatagirk, “Friday Book”, printed by the Venetian Hakob Meghapart (“the sinful James”) at the turn of 1512-13.

The short summaries at the display cases outline the history of Armenian typography. The printing press of Hakob Meghapart was brought by his successor to Constantinople, where in the 18th century they published about 300 works in more than 20 Armenian printing houses. However, the Transylvanian Armenians, who in the late 17th century united with the Catholic church, got the bulk of their books from the Typographia Polyglotta of the Roman Propaganda Fide: by the end of the 18th century we know 44 Armenian works published here. The Mechitarist Order, founded in 1701 in Constantinople, and working from 1715 to the present day on the St. Lazarus Island in Venice – the “Armenian Benedictines”, the greatest exponents of armenology of the period – published their Armenian books in Italian printing houses until the late 18th century, but in 1789 they founded their own printing press, where they published hundreds of books in nearly forty languages: these, due to the Armenian diaspora, reached even the most remote provinces of the Ottoman Empire. In 1773 a group of the Venetian Mechitarists settled in Trieste, and in 1810 they moved to Vienna, having an important scientific and publishing activity in both places.

A Transylvanian Hungarian printer also played a decisive role in the history of Armenian typography. The most influential Armenian printer, Voskan Yerevantsi founded his printing house in Amsterdam in 1660, and as he was unsatisfied with the available Armenian fonts, he ordered the design of a new Armenian font from Miklós Kis of Misztótfalu, which quickly spread throughout Europe, and its various versions are still in use.

A separate room is dedicated, apparently due to the richness of the material, to the monuments of the Armenian Catholic Church in Transylvania, pontifical portraits, church dresses, votive and altar paintings. The three portraits brought from Szamosújvár/Gherla do not necessarily represent the three greatest personalities of the Armenian church, they could have also chosen someone else, such as Bishop Minas Zilifdarean (1610-1686), under whose leadership the Armenians migrate into Transylvania. These three lives, however, well demonstrate the large social and geographical scope of the Armenian intellectuals, and their possibilities of choice between different cultural centers. The Moldova-born Oxendio Virziresco (Verzár) (1655-1715) learned in the Propaganda Fide missionary college in Rome. After 1685 he worked on the union of the Transylvanian Armenians with the Catholic church, first in the midst of great resistance, but in the end with a complete success, and in 1690, after the end of Bishop Minas he became the church leader of the Armenians in Transylvania. Stephano Roska (1670-1739) came from an Armenian family of Kamenets-Podolsk. He was the Armenian provost of Stanislawów (now Ivano-Frankivsk), and on behalf of the Armenian archbishop of Lemberg he visited the four Transylvanian Armenian parishes, founding a number of important religious societies. Mihály Theodorovicz (1690-1760) was born in Bistritz/Beszterce/Bistrița, at that time an important Armenian settlement, and he became from a shop assistant the Archdeacon of Szamosújvár. He built the first Armenian stone church, the Salamon church (1723-25), and he introduced the Gregorian calendar. Maria Theresa appointed him bishop, but eventually it did not receive an ecclesiastical approval: it is since then that the Transylvanian Armenian community has belonged under the Roman Catholic bishop of Gyulafehérvár/Alba Iulia.

Since the 1770s the cult of the Queen of the Rosary was in flower in Szamosújvár, and her auspices were represented in a number of votive paintings offered as a sign of gratitude for being saved for some great trouble. On the images exhibited here, a horseman who escaped a flooding, a family surviving a fire, and a woman recovering from illness say thanks for the intercession of the Virgin Mary.

By the early 19th century the relations of the Armenians with their former Crimean and Anatolian centers became loose, but the way of ascension into the Hungarian bourgeoisie was open to us. They changed their language for Hungarian, and among all the ethnic minorities they participated in the largest proportion in the staff of officers and in the financing of the 1848-49 War of Independence. Two of the famous thirteen generals, executed in Arad on 6 October 1849, Ernő Kiss and Vilmos Lázár were Armenians, and the Armenian general János Czetz in exile became the founder of Argentina’s military geographical institute, which under his direction charted all Argentina. After the Compromise between the Austrian court and the Hungarian political elite in 1867, the Armenians participated in large numbers in the political and cultural life. The last room is a portrait gallery of their prominent representatives.

On the other hand, as a compensation for the assimilation, the ideology of Armenism was born, with the goal of strengthening the Armenian identity. Its followers started large-scale historical research of Transylvanian Armenians, they launched the journal Armenia in Szamosújvár, and in 1905 they founded in the city the Armenian Museum (which just now, in March 2013 received back its collection, nationalized in the 1950s). Eminent representatives of Armenism, Kristóf Lukácsy and Kristóf Szongott also joined the research of Hungarian prehistory, defending in several publications the Hungarian-Armenian linguistic relationship. The show-case of the last room presents a selection of publications on Armenian topics from the 19th and 20th century.

The walls of the exhibition’s exit corridor are covered with photos of Armenian families from the turn of the century, the documents of everyday history. Hundreds of lives and stories that clearly show, how much more to research is in this history. And in this sense the title of this photo collection, Mirror fragments, is indeed valid for the whole exhibition.